


Home is Where You Find It

by Snickfic



Category: Captain Marvel (2019)
Genre: Alien Biology, F/M, Mpreg, Nonnies Made Me Do It, Post-Captain Marvel (2019)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-08-13 05:47:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,006
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20169136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: Mila often seemed to feel Talos’s eyes on her, although she was still shy about approaching him. It was slow work, learning the preferences and moods and joy of this young person he’d carried for a few months once, long ago, and then never seen again. “She’s been asking for a sister for years,” Soren said softly.





	Home is Where You Find It

**Author's Note:**

> My most important Skrull opinions:  
\- Nuzzling takes the place of kissing in Skrull culture.  
\- Skrulls purr in certain circumstances.  
\- Skrull children are entirely non-vocal/non-verbal for the first few years of their life.
> 
> Talos's daughter doesn't have a name mentioned in the movie, so I've called her Mila.
> 
> Written for a long-ago prompt of "Het Mpreg" and never finished until now.

Talos needed to remember all of Soren. He should have been too exhausted for it, that first night aboard the battle cruiser, and yet when they finally found a moment alone—one of the other Skrull women had taken Mila in for the night—he could do nothing else but reacquaint himself with each ridge and crevice of her. 

In between, she murmured stories to him, one after the other, the chronicle of a life lived apart. 

“—her name is Angas, she’s just a year older, and Mila adores her—”

“Buren’s girl,” Talos said, nosing along the crease of Soren’s hip. “I remember.”

Soren had been stroking his skull; now her hands fell still. “Did Buren come with you?”

“We lost Buren two years ago. Accusers off Corriga.”

Soren resumed her stroking and said no more. Talos buried his nose and his feelings between her legs until all he could smell and taste and think of was her.

\--

“Talos,” Soren said, and Talos knew.

He knew it in her voice or the taste of her sweat on the air or because it was inevitable with all the time they’d spent together these past few weeks, these intimacies Talos was starving for and could not keep himself from taking even though he knew what they would lead to: this. This possibility, this potential, theirs for the taking. “Soren—” he said, the beginning of an apology.

Soren smiled and pulled his arm around her waist. Mila’s back was to them, her focus all on the pinball machine. She often seemed to feel Talos’s eyes on her, although she was still shy about approaching him. It was slow work, learning the preferences and moods and joy of this young person he’d carried for a few months once, long ago, and then never seen again. “She’s been asking for a sister for years,” Soren said softly. 

Talos’s chest ached just to hear the word. _Years_, and he felt every second of them, all the way down deep in his blood and his cartilage. “She and I don’t even know one another yet.”

“I told her, when you came back. When it was safe.”

“We have no home yet,” he reminded her. Six planets they’d surveyed so far: five inhabitable, one already all too inhabited. It was early days.

“We have her,” Soren said, with absolute faith. She wasn’t talking about Mila anymore. Soren leaned her head against his shoulder. “If we trigger it tonight, I’ll be ready in about a week. If you want to.”

_When it was safe._

Talos held Soren tighter.

\--

_Triggering_ meant fucking: fucking Soren bare while she was ripe, a sweet ecstasy Talos had only known once before. Afterwards he shimmied down the bed to nuzzle between her legs, lick at her richness, massage her ovulary gland, which was exactly how they’d gotten here in the first place. He brought her off three times and then realized he was crying.

Soren held him until his tears dried. “I didn’t, you know,” he said. “All those years. If I’d started, I couldn’t have stopped. I had to stay focused.”

“Making up for lost time,” Soren said, and stroked his head.

\--

Three days out from Soren’s one-week deadline, Talos went looking for Mila. He found her on the bridge in a circle with three of the other children, playing some game of their own devising with a little ball and some pointy things Carol had recognized as jacks. She’d said she didn’t understand the rules, either. As Talos approached the circle, the other children melted away until it was only Mila sitting there, watching him with her huge brown eyes, so like Soren’s.

Talos sat carefully on the floor’s grating. “Were you winning?” he asked. Mila shrugged. Her voice might come in properly any day now, or it might not for a year. He hadn’t missed that milestone, at least. He asked her the same question with his hands. His signs were stiff, out of practice, but her face lit and she began to sign back, a rapid-fire explanation of the rules that Talos doubted he’d have followed even in words. She was so pleased to tell him, though.

When her explanations had slowed, Talos said, “Your mother says you’d like a sister.”

Mila went very still. There was a light in her eyes that was too cautious and uncertain to be called hope. 

That was his answer, then, he supposed. “What if it turned out it was a brother instead? We can’t really do custom orders for this kind of thing.”

Mila gave this due consideration. After a few moments, eyes still very wide, she met his gaze and made a wobbly gesture with her hand: _either_.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll see what we can do.”

And then he had a lapful of her, hugging him tightly. She’d never hugged him without prompting before. Cautiously he let his arms fall around her slim shoulders.

\--

One day out, in the middle of a strategy session, Talos caught a whiff of Soren from the air duct and lost his entire train of thought. “Everything okay in there, General?” Carol asked, eyebrow high. She looked a moment away from rapping her knuckles on his head.

He was overheated, he realized. His stomach squirmed in pleasant anticipation. Neither of these things boded well for the strategy session. “Kolas,” he said to his lieutenant, “you know our parameters. Can you make sure this planet checks out with all the initial markers?”

“Will do,” Kolas said. He had to know why Talos was asking; Talos must have been reeking with need, apparent to everyone except Carol. But Kolas kept his eyes on the charts, his tone carefully casual. In the tight quarters of space, discretion was everything.

Talos found Soren by herself at one of Mar-Vell’s computers, looking more beautiful than ever. Delicious, really. Irresistible. He saw the moment she caught his scent: her head came up, nose high. “Already?”

“I’ve excused myself from all duties for the duration.” Or perhaps he hadn’t, now that he thought about it. Never mind. Kolas would cover for him.

“Well,” Soren said, smiling that rare, precious smile. She took his hand. “Well.”

\--

After, he remembered the next days only dimly. He remembered time stretched out impossibly long and hazy with pleasure, when there was nothing in the universe but Soren and her prod pressing sweetly into him.

At the end of an eternity, he woke up, sticky and hungry. He was sore all around his pouch slit, and there was an ache deep in his gut. Somehow he’d forgotten those details from the last time.

Soren sat up next to him. “All right?”

“Mm,” Talos said, rubbing at the ache. Soren’s hand covered his, over his belly. Suddenly Talos was struck by their foolishness, by the sheer arrogance of their optimism—by the certainty that this time would be no different from the last. Shaky, he said, “I need to see this one grow up, Soren.”

“You will,” Soren said.

\--

“You’re what?” Carol said, squinting at him. “You can do that?”

“Where did you think infant Skrulls came from? No, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

“Cabbages,” Carol said, after a moment’s silence. The edges of her mouth had begun to curl. “Storks.”

“I don’t know what those are.”

“That’s okay.” Carol turned and settled next to him against the countertop, facing the window. She elbowed him. “Congratulations.”

Talos looked out into the stars. He took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

\--

Somehow, it was the prospect of a sister (or a brother, in a pinch) that finally warmed Mila up to him. Talos would be sitting at the holo table, looking over planetary specs or considering the cruiser’s weapons ops, and suddenly he’d find a small green hand pressed to his middle. It was swelling now, rounding out, and Mila’s fingers stretched as far across it as they could go. After Mila was duly convinced that he did still _have_ a middle, she’d drift around the table, eyeing the holos, eyeing him—assuring herself his continued existence, perhaps.

“What about this world?” he’d say, bringing a single planet into focus, large and bright, with the preliminary specs listed underneath. Mila would read them—she was a great reader, and no wonder, for what else had she had to do on this makeshift home?—and then, with a few flicks of her fingers, tell him how she felt about a planet mostly desert or mostly ocean or given to daily temperature swings from freezing to boiling and back again.

\--

Carol found him at the table, reviewing the specs of their destination once again, though Soren’s science team had already dredged them for everything of value. They knew everything the Kree knew—or everything the Kree had known six years ago, anyway.

Carol didn’t comment on any of that. She dropped into a chair down the table and said, “Couldn’t sleep?”

Talos shook his head. “The little one’s restless, which means I am, too.”

“Monica was like that, when Maria was pregnant.”

Talos grimaced in sympathy. Carol had eventually explained that it was the women who carried the children on C-53. The whole process sounded barbaric, not to mention the inefficiency of burdening one body with both gestation and post-partum nutrition. He’d sooner grow his child in one of the Kree’s regulated tanks than put Soren through that misery. 

Talos shifted his weight and grimaced for a different reason. Carol noticed. “Your back?” When he nodded, she shoved her chair towards him. “Here, turn around. Yeah, straddle it.” The next moment Carol’s photon-powered hands were pushing into Talos’s lower back. He’d given up on his uniform a while ago; now he spent his days in casual, loose-fitting garments from C-53 that Soren called pajamas. They offered Carol no resistance as she worked her knuckles into his flesh.

It felt glorious. It felt like she was working out aches he’d gotten so used to he’d forgotten he’d ever been without them. “You’re quite good at that,” he said, a little breathless from sheer relief.

“Well, the self-heating hands help.”

Now that he paid attention, they did seem warmer than normal.

“So you think this one’s the one, huh?”

It took him a moment to realize she was talking about the planet. Talos focused on it, spinning ever so slowly above the table. It had patches of blue and green and swirls of cloud, and those alone made it one of the more promising prospects they’d tried. 

He’d barely let himself hope, here at the last. “We’ll soon find out,” he said.

“If not, we’ll just go somewhere else,” Carol said. It wasn’t given so much an assurance as a certainty: she would make it so. 

He was in a near-comatose state of bliss by the time Carol finished with him. She found reason to be elsewhere soon after; pensive silences seemed to spook her, and pregnancy brought them out in Talos. Something hormonal, perhaps.

Still, he didn’t take himself back to bed, not yet. The holo file beckoned. He was rotating the world this way and that, inspecting its landforms, when that familiar small green hand appeared in the corner of his eye. It flattened against his belly, which was grown ever larger and more ungainly. Talos held very still. After a moment, the fetus rolled over and kicked at Mila’s hand, as Talos had thought it might. 

Mila inhaled sharply. Into the light-night stillness came a small, croaky voice Talos had never heard before. The voice asked, “What will you name it?”

Talos kept his eyes fixed on the holo, though the tips of his ears had gone cold with unexpected feeling. “I don’t know. What do you think we should name it?”

Mila considered for a little while. “Monica,” she said.

“We’ll put that one on the list, then,” Talos said.

Mila nodded seriously. Talos put his arm around her small shoulders and squeezed her against him. Together, they watched the world spin.

[end]


End file.
